


The God of Clockwork & Strings

by damalur



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Community: help_haiti, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-10
Updated: 2010-03-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 21:12:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sheldon and the universe conspire to give Penny a second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The God of Clockwork & Strings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lisaboston](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=lisaboston).



> For [](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=lisaboston)[**lisaboston**](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=lisaboston), a gracious donor to the [](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=help_haiti)[**help_haiti**](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=help_haiti) charity auction. Her request was for a story set some time after the show, with Penny and Sheldon getting together after Penny is already married or divorced. (Lisa, what you're getting here is not precisely what you asked for, so let me know if you dislike it; I have a backup fic just in case. :) This story would be a poorer and stranger thing if not for the beta skills of [](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=juniperlane)[](http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo?user=juniperlane)**juniperlane**, who owns me completely for her flawless command of punctuation and the color purple.

She's struggling with way, way too many bags of groceries when, unbidden, Sheldon swoops out of nowhere and frees her hands just before she drops her keys down a torn box of Cheerios. "Um, thanks," she says. "You aren't stalking me, are you?"

Sheldon fixes her with an obnoxiously superior look as she fights the deadbolt. "Penny, if I were stalking you—and yes, I may have had three restraining orders taken out against me, but all of those people were famous, and, I might add, daunted by my enthusiasm—if I were stalking you, do you really think you'd know about it?"

Visions dance through her head: Sheldon taping her morning news program, Sheldon hacking her computer, Sheldon tracking every clothing shipment from last year through the present. "You know that the Jessica Simpson heels were on sale, right?" she blurts.

"...Excuse me?"

"Oh. Never mind." She conquers the lock and swings the door open to let him in; living in a high-rise is _fun_, and, also, affords her some amount of privacy, since the neighbors are not determined to worm their way into her existence with offers of take-out and lasers. Except that Sheldon is totally stalking her, turning up once or twice a day while she does laundry or...all the other stuff she does, which means that this plan is a bust.

She drops her keys in the key bowl (what, it's a good idea, okay) and watches as he sorts her food out on the counter by category, then in alphabetical order, before stowing everything in the appropriate cabinet. "Not that I don't appreciate you going all librarian in the kitchen, but where were you, oh, I don't know, a year and half ago?"

He rattles off, "Apartment 4A, Pasadena, California, United States, the Earth—"

"No, I mean, like"—she presses a hand to her temples. "What I mean, Sheldon, is where were you when I was going through my divorce? That's when I could have really used a friend, and you disappeared on me, and now you're turning up on my doorstep like a stray—did Leonard forget to feed you?"

He re-stacks her canned vegetables, his disapproving huffs counterpointed by the clank of tins. "I'm perfectly capable"—_thunk_—"of feeding myself, Penny"—_thunk_—"and as for my timeline"—_thunk_; finished, he turns around to face her—"I'll have you know that studies suggest eighteen months as amount of time a woman needs to recover from the end of a marriage." His scowl fades. "Do you want to know an interesting thing about spinach?"

"Wait, _what_?"

"The world's leading producer of spinach is China, closely followed by—"

"No, what do you mean by 'recover from the end of'...what you said?"

"Divorcees need a period of emotional recovery before they're ready to attempt another amorous relationship," he recites dutifully, like he's reading it off the back of a textbook. Or, you know, the inside of a textbook; Penny found it difficult during her stint at college to crack a book open, but her friendship with Sheldon has taught her that some people actually like that boring stuff, ∞ believe it or not.

"Sheldon, I can't, you know I—we've already taken things far enough."

He looks at her from across his desk, his eyes a high, faded blue that makes her think of summer and drowning and ancient things. A rueful smile threatens his lips; she can read it just there, in the twitch at the corner. "I do know that," he says. It's so strange, to find her way back to him after so many years. The new self-awareness makes him foreign in a way the years hadn't.

"My husband knows," she offers, tugging at the tennis bracelet that circles her wrist. "Not you specifically, obviously, but he's knows I'm...with someone. Someone else. Sheldon, he's threatening to tell my daughter—"

"What would you have me do?" He says the words with such a complete lack of pretense that she flinches. He, this man who is the proudest she's ever known, who would rather die by his own pen than humble himself, is laying all that he is at her feet. She wishes she could savor the moment; instead, it makes her want to cry.

"Leave? Just leave? Pack up your work, take it with you or don't. I think it would be best for all of us if you weren't here any longer."

He hesitates for the span of a heartbeat, nods, sets his hands on the back of his desk chair. "You should go. If you're caught—"

"Will I see you again?"

"Penny—"

"Please."

"No," he says, and just like that, in the space between one lapsed breath and the next, she cracks. When she moves, she fancies she can hear the faultline shift, ∞ can feel her heart move against her ribs like two tectonic plates grinding together.

"Did it mean anything to you?"

He cinches his robe with the air of a knight buckling his armor. "Mean? In what context? Did it mean anything in a cosmic sense, in a biological sense, in a social sense—"

"Did it mean anything _to you_," she hisses. Last night she'd been, oh, so _happy_ that Leonard was gone, but now she wishes he were here just so she'd have one certain, familiar thing to keep her from going under.

"Oh, _personally_. Penny, I don't do this sort of thing, you have to understand that it isn't done. Last night was an _anomaly_."

Her head is pounding. "Jesus on a pony, how did you think I'd react? You know what last night was to me, I know you aren't an idiot, Sheldon!" Her head is pounding, throbbing in time behind her temples, beating to the sound of noiseless, background rage.

In one rash move, she yanks her shirt over her head, balls it up, and attacks his whiteboard. Jackass deserves this, coming to her on a night when she was alone and lonely and offering her what she'd thought was more than simple sex—seeing his equations smear and break under her hands almost makes up for the raw feelings in her heart and between her legs.

"Penny!" he screeches, diving at her. "Penny! don't! those are—I'm on the verge of—"

"On the verge of what, Sheldon? Discovering new and interesting ways to screw with other people's lives? I think you've got that covered." She pulls the shirt back on, wearing the marker streaks as her honorable spoils of war.

"Penny, why—"

"You want to know why?" She pauses inside the door. "Well so do I. Have a nice life," she tells him, ∞ watching unseen as he wanders around the room, touching the flowers, straightening the curtains, flicking through the guest register. He avoids the box in the corner with the ease of a man long accustomed to ignoring anything jarring to his view of the universe.

"Oh, sweetheart," she whispers. "You just don't know what to do with yourself, do you?"

He sighs, he closes the register, he looks out the window. Penny, unable to resist, creeps through the room as if she could still startle him with her footsteps. The casket is simple, a pale off-white color; she would've gone for something brighter, herself, but she doubts they manufacture coffins in fuchsia and teal. If they had, Sheldon probably would have gotten her one. And it's so creepy (creepy doesn't begin to cover it) to look down at her own face, to see the artificial flush in her cheeks and the soft way her lashes cast shadows on her skin. Is this what Sheldon sees when he looks at her? A pretty, unreal thing? Or does he remember her as she was, tanned and happy and, okay, maybe sometimes a little cranky from pulling a long day at work—

"I owe you an apology," he says. She jerks and her head comes up, wildly hopeful—but no, he's still facing the window, talking only to his ghosts.

If only he knew. (And if only she were corporeal, so she could give him the smack upside his head that he clearly and desperately needs. Oddly enough, despite the lack of a tangible, like, _body_, her head is killing her.)

"I was working with five dimensional warped geometry theory when you fell ill," he confesses. "The possibilities were...exciting. I believed I found a way to breach our visible, four-dimensional universe, to...and you weren't supposed to leave" (his voice cracks) "to leave me..."

Her last earthly memory is of his gentle hands stroking her hair as he sang to her.

∞ The clock reads seven as she comes through the door; Sheldon already has tonight's spread of Chinese laid out on the coffee table, with chopsticks for him and two forks for her. She kisses him perfunctorily, skins off her coat, and drops to the couch. He's got the TV muted, which makes complete sense considering the only reason he suffers through _American Idol_ is because she lets him pick what to watch after that.

"Good day at work?" she asks.

He sits next to her and passes the egg rolls. "Productive. I made progress in modeling an ekpyrotic universe, although Leslie Winkle interrupted me in the midst of a breakthrough to berate me for hogging the computer lab. That sign-up sheet was perfectly legitimate."

Penny grins. "Sure it was, sweetheart. It always is." A cabbage flake gets caught on her engagement ring, and she brushes it away, just a quick flick of her fingernail against the diamond. She hands him the soy sauce and he passes back the remote without asking.

"And yours?" Look at this one, all trained up like a real boy.

"S'okay." Penny shrugs and blows on a bite of chicken. "One of the churches wants to book the stage for Lent, although I'm not sure I want to ask why."

Sheldon takes a tidy bite of rice; she can never figure out how he manages that with chopsticks.

"Sweetie, I ∞ get that you're angry at Leonard. I really do. But he's your best friend. Couldn't you at least listen to his apology?"

His shoulders tense, which she figure is Sheldonese for _I'm not talking to you right now_. And she had to bring up the missing-the-new-Star-Trek thing, go her, score one for Penny knowing how to handle the man-genius. Not.

Or hey, maybe so, because he rolls over and looks at her. She cannot get over the neat goatee on his face, though; he looks like he should be handing out cotton candy at a seedy carnival.

"Penny," he says calmly, "you can't be here."

Geez, is he really going to pick now to hold the easement thing against her? "Sweetie, I'm just trying to make you feel better—"

"Your presence here is a physical impossibility." Now he is looking not at but through her. "The odds are six-billion, forty-three million, seven-hundred and forty-two thousand, one-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine to two against—" ∞

"You're Alicia's husband?"

"Doctor Sheldon Cooper." He takes her outstretched hand tentatively, squeezes once, then lets go and backs away, furtively scrubbing his palm against the front of his slacks. It comes across as endearing rather than ridiculous. Penny's surprised; she didn't know she still possessed enough softness to be endeared of a man.

"I'm Penny, Kurt's wife," she says, and throws back the rest of her martini. God only knows how much she needs it. "You're the physicist, right?"

"String theorist." She gives him a look. "Physicist, yes."

"So." They stand beside one another, facing the same direction; Penny can only assume that his gaze, like hers, falls naturally on the spectacle in the middle of the room. Their spouses stand too close, lips saying too little, eyes saying too much. Kurt brushes an eyelash from Alicia's cheek with an intimacy that should be discomforting; Penny feels only an astonishing lack of envy and the first pangs of a migraine.

"Do you think they're..." she says, and jerks her head toward the couple.

"That they're what?" Doctor Cooper says.

"You know." Penny looks at her husband _significantly_.

"Complete thoughts, please," Doctor Cooper says. What, is he stupid?

"Screwing," Penny says. "Do you think that my husband and your wife are screwing."

His expression is dismayed. "How should I know?"

Wow, if he's that blind he almost deserves Alicia for a wife. But—and she looks, inadvertently, at his eyes, which are a faded blue—some forgotten memory stirs.

"Never mind. You don't have any pain reliever around here, do you?"

"In the kitchen. I assume you were asking for the purposes of acquiring a dose, not simply checking on the state of our medicine cabinet."

"Got it in one," Penny says, and follows where he leads. He's a tall man, well dressed, but his clothes seem ill-fitting even though they're exactly as tasteful and tailored as she would expect from Alicia's husband. He opens a cupboard to display a remarkably organized assortment of bottles.

"The impossibility of your existence is staggering," he says. "Do you think you could love me?"

Penny gapes at his back. "What did you say?"

He turns around, brow creased, holding an assortment of pill bottles. "I asked if you'd prefer Tylenol or Advil," he says, "although I'm sure I have some Aleve in the bathroom."

∞ The clock reads half-past eight, and Sheldon's fingers are in her hair. Penny's drowsing, although the show he picked tonight is actually pretty good; cowboys on spaceships, something like that, with the guy from _Castle_. Penny likes _Castle_. She gets _Castle_. With _Castle_, she knows where she stands. She has no frame of reference for cowboys on spaceships and high-class whores and what is up with the naked girl in the box, anyway?

Sheldon circles a particularly sensitive spot. She may or may purr in response.

Evenings like this are what she lives for, the times when Sheldon puts aside his computer and Penny turns off her phone so the community theater can't reach her with one more emergency, and no, she doesn't know why there are pink handprints across the stage even if she heavily suspects the elementary school's production of _The Mouse That Roared_. No phones, no physics; it's almost like they're cocooned in their own universe.

"Hey, Sheldon," she wonders, "do you believe in angels?"

His hands still. "Penny, don't be absurd."

"Well, ∞ crap, Sheldon, did you expect me to read your mind?"

He shuffles her blouses to the far end of the rack and starts to order her pants. "No, I thought that as the more emotionally intelligent being you'd simply be...aware of my intentions."

"Aware of your—Sheldon, I'm getting married in six hours! You're packing for my honeymoon! You can't just spring this on me!" Her hands flounder, and she's pretty sure that she just slung tequila all over her suitcase, but she can't bring herself to care in light of this development that Sheldon clearly pulled out of his ass.

"Okay," she says. "Ha ha, I get it. Bazinga. You sure got me, Sheldon. Where are my nylons?"

"Penny, I'm quite serious." His hands are shaking against the clothes rack, the rack picks up the vibrations and shudders.

"Oh my God. Oh, my God. You really..."

"Yes," he says. "It's fallacious of you to feel the same way. Why do you?"

"What?" Penny says, derailed for the second time in as many minutes.

His eyes pin her. His eyes look through her. "I berate you. I belittle your pursuits, mock your interests, and Penny, did you forget the time I tried to train you like a dog?"

"Sheldon, what...? You've never..." She is _so_ bewildered in this moment. "You've never said anything about that before..."

"Oh? That seems rude of me, doesn't it. I doubt my mother would approve."

"Well, no..." Penny tries. "I don't...I mean, yeah, sometimes you aren't very good at, you know, sympathy and, and treating other people like human beings."

"So why would you care to pursue a relationship with me? Be specific, Penny." She almost expects him to produce a tablet and start taking notes.

"Sheldon, you just told me on my wedding day that you're _in love with me_, so why are we talking about...?"

"It's an elementary question. I have a survey drawn up, though, if you'd prefer that."

"And I repeat: what are you on?" Oh, hey, tequila. In her hand. That's kind of...handy.

"Penny, we've ∞ been separated for three years. Isn't that long enough?"

She can't believe he keeps nagging her about this. Constantly. For the past two years and eleven months. The doing it in her office thing is new, though. She's gotten letters and phone calls and e-mails before, but he's never show up in person to her workplace.

"Sheldon, look," she says. "We fought all the time. Can you really say you were happy?"

He meets her eyes unflinchingly. "Yes."

Holy cow. That she hadn't seen coming.

"You...what?"

"Yes," Sheldon repeats. "Yes, I was happy. With you."

"Couldn't you have told me that before?" she asks. The hint of desperation leaks through despite her best effort.

He counters with, "Did you honestly believe I would put a woman above my work?"

"Sheldon, your work wasn't ever the problem." And if he thinks it was, she can't imagine what he's doing here. He does gets points for tenacity, though, she'll give him that. No, the problem had never been his work; what it came down to was that they were too different. That's all. Just...radically different, she said left and he went right and then they argued about it for the rest of the day. Weren't marriages supposed to be easy? "I was never anything but supportive of you. I didn't even have a problem when you told me I wouldn't understand, because, hello, I know that I wouldn't. It was the disinterest that hurt."

"Can you really accuse me of disinterest?" he says.

∞ The clock reads ten. She's just about ready to head for bed—or, whatever, fall asleep here and let Sheldon hustle her off the couch when his rigorous internal alarm finally alerts him it's time to turn in for the night. ∞

"Hello," he says. "What is your position on area rugs?"

She blinks against a headache and turns over the photo album in her hands. "I'm sorry?"

"I'm your new neighbor from across the hall. You aren't interested in having children, are you?"

"Not...really...what's your name?"

"Doctor Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D." He hooks a thumb under the strap of his messenger bag, and she remembers his hands on her body. They've never met before. "You're going to find me difficult, even at times hurtful."

"You light me up," she counters.

"I tear you down," he says. "When I ache you cry, and when you cry I tell you to stop wailing because you're disturbing my environment."

"You make me better," she says. "What's all that stuff about opposites attracting? Face it, tiger, you need me."

"I spurn _Homo sapiens_. I don't need anyone. I certainly don't need you."

The plaid of his hideous pants has her wanting to burst into tears. Maybe it's not the pants. "Let's see you try to navigate Pottery Barn on your own," she spits. Her ire is up, she's feeling a little bit angry, boys, and we all know what happens when the woman gets angry.

"You're inconsequential."

"Kiss my Barbie!"

"I don't want to kiss anything of yours," he snaps, and disdain drips from his tone and his composure, and she sees right through him. He might as well be hollow, might as well be carved inside-out, for how transparent he is to her.

"Yeah?" she says, and steps right up to him, goes toe-to-toe. "Big words from a man once treed by a waitress. I'll die fighting if I have to, but I'm not letting us—"

∞ The clock reads eleven.

∞ The clock reads—

_her universe is dark_

  
_and there is sound, the grinding of celestial gears_

  
Hearing returns before vision, but there is little to hear in this world that once more seems capable of holding light: intermittent beeping, the quiet hum of machinery, and a noise that sounds strangely like an angry Leslie Winkle playing Halo.

Sheldon's face swims into view. Gray hair. When did he start going gray? Dream, Penny thinks, gotta be a dream.

"The existence of your consciousness is profoundly improbable," Sheldon says.

Penny sits up and groans. She feel like she's been on one of her three-day post-breakup benders, nausea settled in her stomach and her pulse drumming out a tattoo against her brain. "Urgh," she says. "Mmf."

Sheldon smooths her hair out of her face. "You may be feeling nauseated. Do not panic." Now he sounds like that safety pamphlet on an airplane: _Flotation devices are marked with the head of Spock and located beneath your food trays, please do not touch anyone to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and feelings._ "It's a common side-effect of multidimensional travel," Sheldon adds.

"Multiwhosit?"

"You've been pulled through alternate dimensions."

She squints at a Sheldon who is not her Sheldon, studies the new crinkles around his face and the graying hair and what pops out of her mouth is, "So are you like, mirror Sheldon or something?"

He honest-to-God smiles at her, wide and delighted. She doesn't even feel the lurking suspicion that he's going to feed her to scary clown people. "Precisely. But not evil. More neutral good than lawful evil, although Spock certainly shifted alignment by the end of the—"

"Sheldon."

"Yes." He clears his throat. "I'd forgotten how young you were. Are."

"I—" For the first time the room around her catches her attention. She has the impression of an immense cavern, but only a small area is lit, and it's filled with technical-looking equipment and mirrors and in the corner a TV, in front of which a curly-haired woman mutters curses at the screen. "Is Leslie Winkle playing Halo over there?"

His smile sours, but he still seems unable to move his eyes from her face. "Unfortunately."

"And is this some kind of, of...mad scientist's lair?"

"'Lair' is a misnomer," Sheldon says.

"Speak for yourself!" Leslie shouts from her corner. "I'm not some godless atom-smasher, I'm an experimental theologian! Dumbass," she adds, ostensibly under her breath.

"She's not from our universe," Sheldon apologizes. "Or an analogue. WINKLE!" he shouts back. "I'm given to understand that your vagina breeds mites, much like a cheese!"

"That insult is highly derivative!" Leslie hollers. "And hurry it up, we haven't got all day!"

Sheldon makes one of his angry cat noises. "At any rate, I ran into a...you might call it a hiccup in my simulations. But now that you're here, it's simple enough to send you back to the correct point and restore the universes to order, and hopefully in time for vintage game night." He spins away from her, booting up screen after screen. "You need to stand here"—he tugs her upright and directs her to the center of an array of wires and mirrors—"and when the generator starts up—"

"Sheldon."

His eyebrows shoot up and he pauses, hands splayed across a keyboard. "What is it?"

"What is this about? All of this? You don't just wake up and decide to...I don't even know what you're doing here, but this is out of science fiction."

And he goes still, so still that she wonders if he's breathing. "I lost you," he says, very quietly.

"So you build a time machine to find me? That doesn't...I don't understand."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out one of the dice on steroids that he uses to play tabletop games. "This dice has twenty sides," he says. "If I roll it"—he does, and it lands with nineteen face-up—"in our universe, it lands on nineteen, but that act creates another universe for every other number, too. There's a universe in which I rolled a three, and one in which I rolled a four, and so on. You've been...traveling along possibilities. It was something of an unanticipated occurrence," he explains, which is Sheldonese for _fluke_.

"This," Penny says, "is absolutely insane."

"No," Sheldon says, "just unprecedented. The solution is remarkably elegant; all I need do is transfer you to the proper universe at the proper instance—this isn't, as I said, a time machine, time travel is incidental—and I believe both you and I will be satisfied with the outcome."

"Oh." She thinks about that. "When you say you lost me—am I dead, or did we split up, or...?"

"Do you want me to answer that?" It isn't a leading question, he doesn't seem to expect an affirmative or otherwise.

"No," she says. "No, probably not. Is this going to hurt?"

Sheldon, as ever, refuses to pull his punches. "It may feel like dying."

"Oh. Yeah, okay. Okay." Her hands tremble, and she sticks them in her pockets. She wishes she had something better to say, because this is some seriously insane shit that is going down. "What happens to you?"

"I won't know that anything is different," he says. "Here and now, this possibility, will collapse."

"It may feel like dying?"

"It may feel like dying." His fingers fly over the computer array, and her vision starts to tinge white. "Finished," he says, "but before you go—"

He steps into the circle and presses the most fragile of kisses to her forehead. "Grace be with you," he murmurs to her skin, and backs away.

The white fades to gray, little colorless sparks interfering with her sight. "Hey," she says, "hey, isn't this some pretty crazy science stuff, and if you collapse it you won't—"

From outside her world, he catches and holds her whole in his gaze. "I am aware," he says, and then she is falling.

∞

The clock reads eight-thirty. Sheldon's stroking her hair while they watch _Farscape_—nope, wait, this one is _Firefly_. Maybe she can get him to work on her feet next; they're killing her after herding elementary school kids all day. (Don't they have their own theater at their own school?) That idea prompts her to twist around and attempt the tried and true tactic of staring at him until he pays attention to her. He's kind of like a cat, in that he hates when people watch him for no reason. Soon enough his eyes flick from the screen to her face, and then she holds the contact a beat longer until she coaxes a hint of a smile out of him.

"Hey, Sheldon," she says, meaning to ask him about that foot rub, but what comes out is, "Do you believe in angels?"

She could smack herself for that. They've already done the psychic discussion, the ley-line discussion, the multiplicity-of-religions discussion, and the spirituality-is-not-a-topic-for-dinner discussion, all of which ended with a renewal of the your-beliefs-are-not-mine-and-that's-okay agreement.

His brow creases. "I think," he says slowly, "that I don't believe in a universe so limited it has only enough room for one view of the cosmos."

Never, never will he stop surprising her. "Yeah?"

"Yes," he says. "Is it trivia time, or may I resume the episode?"

"Your choice, sweetheart." Her head fits in the crook of his shoulder like they were made for each other. Once she's rearranged the blanket to her liking, she starts a slow backwards count from ten.

At six, he fidgets.

At two, he opens his mouth and says, "Do you want to know an interesting thing about spinach?"


End file.
